QASource Blog

Unique Pain Points for Healthcare Domain Testing: Part 1

When it comes to building and testing software products, the healthcare domain is one of the most rigorous and unique areas to work. Product companies in this space are helping doctors, patients, and other medical professionals reimagine what’s possible with wearable technology, hospital indexing systems, and countless other innovations.

The complexity of these new products demands testing that is thorough and stringent, as the quality can directly impact a patient’s life. Other high-stakes factors to consider are the cost and worth of the product to the customer, the protection of private and confidential patient data, and the safety of all patients or caregivers who interface with the product.

In this three-part blog series, we’ll explore the pain points that are unique to healthcare software testing, and explore their solutions.

Lack of domain expertise

Healthcare projects have a complex architecture, multiple workflows, and large volumes of data. Testers must have the right training and required certifications so that they have a clear understanding of the business workflows, make informed decisions, and can find the root cause of an issue.

Pain points

If the subject matter experts lack the qualifications, instead of spending time discussing the substance of clinical content, they will waste time trying to understand how the system works.

Making logical progression as each question/answer will lead to the next logical question.

At the learning stage, don’t raise direct defects - instead raise questions to confirm understanding from the business analyst or product owner.

Resources need to be flexible enough to inherit and grasp new technologies and tools, continuous expansion of testing skill sets will be required.

Healthcare standards

As mentioned, the healthcare space is heavily monitored and standardized - for good reason. HIPAA, the FDA, and other governing bodies ensure that standards preserving the quality of care and the security of patient data are upheld. Because of the strictness of healthcare software testing, some pain points come up.

Pain points

Interoperability of electronic health information and inadequacy in testing.

Testers need to have appropriate information of various standards like FDA, ISO, HL7, CMMI, etc., to ensure that applications adhere to proper standards including:

Solutions

Despite the above-listed challenges, your QA team can overcome them by taking some effective measures:

Performing comprehensive healthcare application testing by adhering the rules and regulations of each healthcare standard being used in the application.

Thorough functional testing using superlative sender and receiver tools will help verify correct information is being transmitted and ensuring the terminologies and lab codes being used are as per the healthcare standards.

Data migration

New technologies emerge every day. As a result, healthcare companies migrate to improved platforms for new features, better functionality, delightful user experience, and increased security and reliability. The benefit is there, but it comes along with a risk—how to transfer the data over?

Transferring massive amounts of data is a challenge for any enterprise environmentsince any interruptions or issues with data storage compatibility can expose sensitive healthcare data, loss of patient data and hinder privacy. Below are some of the challenges that come with migrating healthcare data from the legacy platform to the new one.

Pain points

QA teams are majorly affected by migration tasks since they need to work closely on resource planning. This includes hiring of new resources with the required skill set for migration, along with retaining the existing members for testing legacy applications and understanding new application workflows based on current business logic.

Adhering to project timelines.

Re-factorization of existing test suites and creation of new test suites from scratch, as per new applications/platform, which is very time-consuming.

Another important factor is testing data profiling and governance of migrated data, as failure to do so may lead to data leakage.

There exists a high risk of major data loss for data kept in transitional states, so precise transitional testing is needed.

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Written by QA Experts

QASource Blog, for executives and managers, shares QA strategies, methodologies, and new ideas to inform and help effectively deliver quality products, websites, and applications.

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